The Crass Warfare of Billionaires Against Sanders and Warren
By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News
07 November 19
For many decades, any politician daring to fight for economic justice was
liable to be denounced for engaging in "class warfare." It was always a
grimly laughable accusation, coming from wealthy elites as well as their
functionaries in corporate media and elective office. In the real world,
class warfare - or whatever you want to call it - has always been an
economic and political reality.
In recent decades, class war in the USA has become increasingly lopsided.
The steady decline in union membership, the worsening of income inequality,
and the hollowing out of the public sector have been some results of ongoing
assaults on social decency and countless human lives. Corporate power has
run amuck.
Now, the billionaire class is worried. For the first time in memory, there's
a real chance that the next president could threaten the very existence of
billionaires - or at least significantly reduce their unconscionable rate of
wealth accumulation - in a country and on a planet with so much human misery
due to extreme economic disparities.
In early fall, when Bernie Sanders said "I don't think that billionaires
should exist," many billionaires heard an existential threat. It was hardly
a one-off comment; the Bernie 2020 campaign followed up with national
distribution of a bumper sticker saying "Billionaires should not exist."
When Elizabeth Warren stands on a debate stage and argues for a targeted
marginal tax on the astronomically rich, such advocacy is anathema to those
who believe that the only legitimate class war is the kind waged from the
top down. In early autumn, CNBC reported that "Democratic donors on Wall
Street and in big business are preparing to sit out the presidential
campaign fundraising cycle - or even back President Donald Trump - if Sen.
Elizabeth Warren wins the party's nomination."
As for Bernie Sanders - less than four years after he carried every county
in West Virginia against Hillary Clinton in the presidential primary - the
state's Democratic senator Joe Manchin flatly declared last week that if
Sanders wins the nomination, he will not vote for his party's nominee
against Trump in November 2020.
Some billionaires support Trump and some don't. But few billionaires have a
good word to say about Sanders or Warren. And the pattern of billionaires
backing their Democratic rivals is illuminating.
"Dozens of American billionaires have pulled out their checkbooks to support
candidates engaged in a wide-open battle for the Democratic presidential
nomination," Forbes reported this summer. The dollar total of those
donations given directly to a campaign (which federal law limits to $2,800
each) is less significant than the sentiment they reflect. And people with
huge wealth are able to dump hundreds of thousands or even millions of
dollars at once into a Super PAC, which grassroots-parched AstroTurf
candidate Joe Biden greenlighted last month.
The donations from billionaires to the current Democratic candidates could
be viewed as a kind of Oligarchy Confidence Index, based on data from the
Federal Election Commission. As reported by Forbes, Pete Buttigieg leads all
the candidates with 23 billionaire donors, followed by 18 for Cory Booker,
and 17 for Kamala Harris. Among the other candidates who have qualified for
the debate coming up later this month, Biden has 13 billionaire donors and
Amy Klobuchar has 8, followed by 3 for Elizabeth Warren, 1 for Tulsi
Gabbard, and 1 for Andrew Yang. Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders has zero
billionaire donors.
(The tenth person who has qualified for the next debate, self-funding
billionaire candidate Tom Steyer, is in a class by himself.)
Meanwhile, relying on contributions from small donors, Sanders and Warren
"eagerly bait, troll and bash billionaires at every opportunity," in the
words of a recent Los Angeles Times news story. "They send out missives to
donors boasting how much damage their plans would inflict on the wallets of
specific wealthy families and corporations."
The newspaper added: "Sanders boasts that his wealth tax would cost Amazon
owner Jeff Bezos $8.9 billion per year. He even championed a bill with the
acronym BEZOS: The Stop Bad Employers By Zeroing Out Subsidies Act would
have forced Amazon and other large firms to pay the full cost of food stamps
and other benefits received by their lowest-wage employees."
For extremely rich people who confuse net worth with human worth, the
prospect of losing out on billions is an outrageous possibility. And so, a
few months ago, Facebook mega-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg expressed his
antipathy toward Warren while meeting with employees. As a transcript of
leaked audio makes clear, Warren's vision of using anti-trust laws to break
up Big Tech virtual monopolies was more than Facebook's head could stand to
contemplate.
"But look," Zuckerberg said, "at the end of the day, if someone's going to
try to threaten something that existential, you go to the mat and you
fight."
The fight happening now for the Democratic presidential nomination largely
amounts to class warfare. And the forces that have triumphed in the past are
outraged that they currently have to deal with so much progressive
opposition. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, "A conqueror is always a lover
of peace."
Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He
was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic
National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched
independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books
including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to
Death.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
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